


What if..... Origin Story

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:15:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26141710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: The dreams should be clarifying, but they're not. They're really not.
Comments: 33
Kudos: 183





	What if..... Origin Story

They wake up screaming.

In Torreano, Josep and Nico clutch each other and catch their breath, still feeling the pain from the dream. Nico is sweating with it, but he shakes off Josep's attempt at comfort. He's still too connected to the dream that being touched hurts right now.

"All I saw was needles and light," he breathes out, looking down at his arms, which do not show any marks despite the visceral feeling of being injected still present. He can feel the burn in his veins. "He's an experiment."

"But where?" Josep asks as he reaches for his satchel, rubbing hard at his face with his other hand. "The Germans are torturing people all over. We have to find him. This won't stop until we do."

With the notebook on his lap, he hazards a gentle touch to Nico's shoulder and Nico allows it, focusing on it to ground him in the waking world. It's been more than a century since Baz and he'd forgotten how awful that had been, how all-encompassing the nightmares had been until they'd found him.

"At least we knew where to look," he mutters, belatedly realizing he's trusting Josep to follow his thoughts. But Josep grunts agreement as rubs his shoulder and gives him a final squeeze before pulling back to lean against the wall. Nico moves to sit up as well.

"We have to meet him and Andren first," Josep says, scribbling notes on a clean page. "Find out what they are seeing. Do you think we can make it to Fiesch or should we go straight to Grenoble?"

They'd set rally points, less for something like this than as a kind of check-in during a war that was spread out and ever-changing. They'd been split up since '34, meeting up every couple of years at a location they'd set the previous gathering knowing full well that the war might make it a challenge. They weren't supposed to see each other until April '44, but these dreams would move the date up.

"If we can get to Verona inside a week, we should try for Fiesch," Nico says, closing his eyes to see the map in his mind. The place names changed over the centuries and new roads appeared out of nowhere, but the geography remained the same. The situation on the ground, however, they would not know until they got there. The Germans were all over the north of Italy like it was five hundred years ago and while he knows how long it would take them to walk or ride a horse from here to the Swiss cantons, that was a peacetime estimation. "We might not see Andren until Grenoble, though."

Josep has finished scribbling and started drawing, a man's frail naked torso with ribs visible and strapped to a surface, skinny arms with fingers splayed out as if he were riding out the pain that still echoed in Nico's body. He turns away.

It takes them four days to get to Verona, walking to Udine and getting a ride to Vicenza, but there to Verona is hard going. They move at night and sleep rough during the day. At first they are wary of the nightmares as much as the Germans, but the Germans aren't looking too hard for malingerers or rebels here and the dreams grow more weird and less painful.

Josep's drawings are still of rooms with no windows and the peering faces of doctors and Nico still dreams of needles, but the panic from the first nightmares is gone and in its place is a more manageable fear and confusion and sorrow. The pain is still there, but it's like being stretched out and not being lit on fire from within.

"Blond hair, blue eyes," Baz confirms when they find him in what might be Switzerland's only grimy tavern. It's not actually filthy, but the Swiss are the Swiss and this place hasn't been refreshed since the Sonderbundskrieg. "A Jew? They're not experimenting on anyone who could pass as Aryan."

By the time they have to move on to Grenoble, the dreams are getting very strange. At first they think they're hallucinations, that their new brother is out of his mind with whatever his torturers are injecting him with, but that doesn't quite make sense with what they see. They just don't have a better explanation for why the body they see is now is healthy and strong and they argue whether it's Canova or Bernini or Michelangelo's sculpture they are imagining.

"The Germans have a serum that will turn a man into a superman," Andren tells them when she finds them. "Our boy's an ubermensch."

Which is enough to put all of them off their appetite, although Andren gives Nico and Josep grief for their hypocrisy.

"We'll straighten him out," she tells them all with a frown. "But we have to find him first."

They have contacts among the Resistance, some of whom know others who are near the German centers of power and can maybe find out where to start looking. Nico doesn't think it will be Italy or the Balkans, where he and Josep have been for the last year or so, but maybe Romania wouldn't be out of the question. Baz thinks it will be Berlin, which would be both good and terrible. Andren doesn't share her guesses and tells them she'll be back in a week.

Baz dreams of being on a stage dressed like a Douglas Fairbanks character. Josep has an erotic dream with a woman who looks like Marlene Dietrich, which he finds mortifying but Nico finds hilarious.

Andren returns to them with a tiny film reel. They don't have a projector, so they have to look at the cells up again the light.

"This is not what I was expecting," Josep says with profound confusion as he hands the film over to Nico, who squints to see.

"But it explains Marlene Dietrich," Baz says with a deep laugh that gets louder after Josep swats at him.

Nico can describe what he's looking at, but he cannot explain it. "The Americans created a super-soldier so they could have an actor?"

By the time they find Captain America, Steve Rogers is no longer an actor.

**Author's Note:**

> [This was posted to tumblr if you'd like to like or reblog there](https://laporcupina.tumblr.com/post/627618656236584960/what-if-origin-story-mcuthe-old-guard)


End file.
